Michael White's Blog, page 10

Welby shows grace under pressure while Cameron loses his poise

What the two stories have in common is the insight they provide into how the other half live

What a week for Eton. It will certainly be able to raise its £35,700-a-year fees after the deluge of publicity generated by former pupils David Cameron and Justin Welby and their colourfully disruptive families. Grace under pressure, isn’t that what they pay to acquire? The prime minister stumbled badly but may yet recover his poise. The oilman turned archbishop never lost it.

By the weekend the row over Cameron’s tax affairs, arising from Guardian disclosures from the Panama Papers, ran in parallel with the revelations about Welby’s real father. Indeed, conspiracy theorists on Twitter were quick to ask whether the latter was published by the Daily Telegraph to distract from the former. Life is usually less cunning. Cock-up trumps conspiracy.

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Archers domestic abuse story: we need to talk about male victims

Stabbing of Rob Titchener character reminds us that, despite the necessary focus on women, men can be targets too

No, I don’t listen to The Archers, but I respect the devotion of friends who do. Devotee or not, you’d have had to be abroad without internet access last week to have missed the rustic soap’s dramatic plotline in which long-suffering Helen Titchener stabbed her abusive husband, Rob.

Part of the controversy it aroused was that some devotees expected Helen to be the victim of the near-fatal climax to this story of domestic violence. As the newspapers report, at least two women are killed by current or former partners in England and Wales every week, many more are injured, often after years of profoundly controlling and coercive behaviour.

Related: The Archers storyline: Have you been affected by domestic violence?

Related: We’re blind to an epidemic of domestic abuse | Joan Smith

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Dutch referendum result is latest energy-sapping blow to EU cohesion

Europe isn’t coming together in a federal fantasy, it’s coming apart. We’ll miss it if it disappears

When it comes to the propriety of the government’s 27 million pro-EU leaflets, which are coming your way in the post, we are invited to choose between London’s spluttering part-time mayor, Boris Johnson, and phoney outrage specialist, Michael Fallon, the nation’s part-time defence secretary. That’s a tough one.

On a personal note I would much rather be marooned on a desert island with clever and amusing Boris, though I would insist on his being allowed to bring along a goat for personal use. In the early hours of 12 October 1984 I was sparring with young Fallon over Thatcherism at the bar of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, but left him five minutes before the IRA bomb went off. The cabinet’s verbal assassin and the real ones remain unhappily associated in my mind.

Related: Dutch EU no vote has worrying lessons for anti-Brexit campaign

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Port Talbot steel crisis: why we can't just blame Brussels

The problem is Chinese imports, and the actions of British politicians dating back to Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act

If Michael Heseltine has made any public comments about Tata’s looming closure of the steel plant in Port Talbot, I missed it. The normally loyal Hezza’s silence speaks loudly about the failure of David Cameron’s government to anticipate the crisis or take effective action to mitigate its fearful consequences. One of the more boneheaded consequences may be a boost for the Brexit campaign.

It is not as if the Swansea-born former deputy prime minister, ex-trade secretary and self-made wealthy entrepreneur is sentimental about the industry, any more than he was when he forced pit closures in the 90s. Only last November Hezza was blandly telling Sky News that job losses at Tata would be “painful for those who suffer” but that a buoyant UK labour market means it is as good a time as any to lose them. But we can be reasonably confident that he would have grasped the significance of Tata’s looming board meeting in Mumbai and not jetted off to Australia as Sajid Javid, his hapless successor as business secretary, did until hauled back by a similarly chillaxed David “Lanzarote” Cameron. Javid’s vestigial chances of future Downing Street glory are now worse than Port Talbot’s chances of a rescue. It serves him right.

Related: Britain's free market economy isn't working

Related: The Guardian view on the steel crisis: Port Talbot matters more than China | Editorial

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Few leaders really know their enemies – 'Et tu, Brute?'

List of MPs loyal to and hostile to Jeremy Corbyn is not only funny, it is also inevitably wrong, because politicians need critical friends as well as courtiers, and because their opinions evolve

Shopping lists are excellent, as are daily “to do” lists. But writing lists of your political friends and enemies is good fun (politicians do it all the time), while rarely being a good idea. This is especially true if the list is then leaked to a Corbyn-baiting newspaper, as happened this week with the leak (“core group negative”) to the Times.

Assuming the naughty deed was done by an insider on the Corbynite Good Guys list (or did Michael Gove get a copy?), the list’s compilers may need to do a spot of reclassification following a witch hunt, possibly even a quick purge before lunch. David Cameron, meanwhile, deployed the list at Wednesday’s PMQs to deflect urgently needed criticism and mock the Labour leadership. The Times ran a jolly “politburo” editorial.

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Labour's challenge: to rescue capitalism from its own arrogance

Elites have lost the healthy fear once provided by ‘the communist spectre’ and now capitalist excess is going unchecked

A few weeks ago a Letters to the Editor contributor from Hertfordshire suggested that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, global society’s elites have lost the “healthy sense of fear” they felt towards their fellow citizens for 200 years after the French Revolution. They would be wise, he wrote, to recover it before angry peasants burn down their chateaux again.

It’s an unremarkable sentiment, though less frequently aired than it should be in these unequal times, when tax-dodging corporate executives and reckless bankers are so publicly brazen in their defence of malpractices that cheat customer, taxpayer and shareholder. Just watch a few sessions of evidence to the Commons public accounts committee on BBC Parliament if you still need convincing.

Related: The end of capitalism has begun

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Cuba needs modernising – but it can manage without McDonald's

This long-isolated country has lost a lot, but it is in danger of being spoilt in countless ways – the golden arches included

Though the chain once loomed large in my children’s lives, nowadays I try not to think about McDonald’s more than a couple of times a year. So it came as a shock to discover that decades of economic sanctions mean that Cuba is one of the few countries in the world without a single branch of the fast-food restaurant.

No Starbucks either, no Coke (though Sprite seems to have been smuggled in). In a world of cloned high streets, awash with mostly bland global brands, it’s an extraordinary thought. “Maybe it will be a good thing that McDonald’s doesn’t open. It will be the first step towards our death,” the Guardian quoted a Havana hotel concierge as saying after the US president, Barack Obama, arrived to shake hands with his Cuban counterpart, Raúl Castro.

Related: McDonald's 34,492 restaurants: where are they?

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IDS quitting over Osborne cuts: Brexit stunt or peasants' revolt?

Brexit was probably a factor but the deep personal animosity between Osborne and IDS cannot be overlooked

I’m not a fan of flamboyant ministerial resignations which usually reveal more about large egos and low calculation than they do about good judgment. So my initial response to Iain Duncan Smith walking the welfare plank he has lovingly polished for years was that it was probably a Brexit stunt.

Related: Corbyn calls on Osborne to follow Duncan Smith and resign – Politics live

Related: Osborne's weakness suddenly becomes a big headache for Cameron

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Does England really need more mayors and more academies?

The evidence is thin that either of these ‘reforms’, announced by George Osborne in his budget, will do any good

Did I miss something in all the acres of budget coverage in print, online and on the airwaves? Lots of stuff about “sugaring the pill” as George Osborne tried to dig himself out of a hole of his own devising. Even the blowhard Daily Mail admits that his latest “awesome gamble” is going to need lots of luck.

Overnight coverage contains all the usual Treasury tax figures which never quite convey the snarky details. At least the tone this March is more soberly realistic than it was when the chancellor found an unexpected £27bn down the back of the sofa in November. It seems all the money was lost when the sofa covers were dry cleaned.

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Don't be fooled by more budget promises of infrastructure spending

Whatever George Osborne says, putting huge sums into grandiose schemes is not always the panacea it is made out to be

I love it when wise guys in all political parties and none say: “We must invest more in infrastructure.” George Osborne is doing it again today. This budget the chancellor is going big on transport. Jeremy Corbyn may veer off in another favoured direction. Housing anyone? Windfarms? Hinkley Point C?

Yet it’s never that easy. Announcing plans is quite different from implementing them, which is why plans are so often recycled. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling probably first announced some schemes that Osborne will “unveil” again today, as even cautious reporters have felt the need to point out in recent days.

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